Les Règles du savoir-vivre dans la société moderne

Being born isn't complicated. Dying is easy. To live, between these two events, is not necessarily impossible. Especially when you can refer to a compendium of good manners... And it's indeed from a real 19th-century Manuel de Savoir vivre that Jean-Luc Lagarce drew his inspiration. From these serious, pontificating precepts, he had fun rewriting, pushing the envelope a little further. These books were supposed to give you the keys to a good upbringing for every event in your life, so that you behave like a well-bred person in every situation. Jean-Luc Lagarce has fun with it, and the staging gives the text a lightness, an irony, a drollery which, if it doesn't necessarily make us better "brought up", certainly delights us.

Part of the audience is invited to a banquet (the other is in the auditorium). Guests are welcomed with consideration and warmth, and seated at several tables set up on the stage. To one side, atop a dais, sits the Baroness, dispenser of good manners, surrounded by the evening's entertainers. While she is caught up in the uninterrupted flow of her words, reeling off with desperate precision the various rules to be observed in the organization of life's principal ceremonies (christenings, engagements, weddings, silver and gold weddings, funerals, as well as their preparatory and consecutive phases), the servants surrounding her evolve in the playing area, in the center of the spectators.